SC - another question

[Philip & Susan Troy]

snowfire at mail.snet.net wrote:
> 
> I just received a late Christmas gift of a small basket of Marzipan
> Fruits.  Miniature oranges, apples, lemons, strawberries, plums,
> pears...  (Made by "Past Times, Oxford, England). :-)
<snip>
> On the bottom of the label is written,
> 
> "Wealth was often flaunted at Renaissance Courts in the form of
> splendid sugar and Marzipan sculptures".
> 
> This sparked my curiosity.  Was this a big thing in Period then?

Yep. Not necessarily marzipan fruits per se, but sculpted illusion foods
in a variety of shapes and sizes. The first period instructions that
come to mind (although far from the earliest that exist, I'm sure) are
the sixteenth-century recipes compiled from various manuscript sources
in Book V of "Curye On Inglysch" (Oxford University Press, 1985), a.k.a.
'Goud Kokery', specifically the recipes for "ymages in sugar" in which
various shapes are cast, molded, or cut from warm sugar candy. Almost
period is Sir Hugh Plat's "Delites for Ladies and Gentlewomen", 1609,
which tells how to make a compound for casting fruits, nuts, and other
stuff into molds, which can then be half-filled with hot sugar candy and
rolled around until the mold is lined with the stuff, giving you a
hollow sugar fruit, walnut, etc. The hollowness is emphasized as
something you might want, but no mention is made of filling it up with
anything, if I remember correctly. Since the recipes date from a time
when sugar is beginning to become _fairly_ commonplace, I'm not sure if
being cheaper than solid sugar fruits might be an issue or not.

BTW, when you go and make the compound as Plat instructs, what you end
up with is chemically identical to Plaster of Paris ;  ), or so I'm
assured by a chemist friend. 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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